Stun..
That made me laugh when IW as making my brute, I scanned the powers and allmost wet myself to see that the poor brutes had to put up with that power at a fairly high lvl, as opposed to Spurr(sonic/en blaster) who was able to take it low lvl.
Its soooo slow, effective if it works..But lets be honest by the time the animation is over, the rest of your party have left the mission,created new chars and hit lvl 50 allready with them....Oh and you miss the villain anyway 
Whirling hands is great, and usefull at keeping the mobs close to hand
As long the disorient bug is still around, whirling hands is imho the worst aoe power brutes/tankers can have. They more likely to run away with speed of light then sticking around you.
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Stun you can definately avoid, it sucks.
I'd also avoid barrage, it's a really low damage power, however most brutes i know use low damage powers such as barrage to help build fury, so maybe barrage could be okay? Honestly i wouldn't take it and stick with energy punch for upfront damage. If you run out of EM attacks to fire just hit brawl to keep the attack cycle and build more and more fury.
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I agree with this post, stun sucks donkey balls and barrage costs slightly more endurance then brawl even if it does gemerate fury. The ones I would skip out are;
Barrage: Low damage and is a waste of a level
Stun: Little to no damage, your other powers already stun anyway
Taunt: Not really needed I think, although others may disagree
I'd disagree with the assessment of barrage - it is far superior to brawl for sticking on auto to generate fury. 1) it is part energy damage (a good thing), 2) it costs fractionally more end, but recharges fast enough, and does more damage, 3) with the very fast combo of barrage and energy punch you can generally achieve disorients on the majority of mobs, especially with bonesmasher thrown in too.
Whirling hands is useful enough at grabbing aggro, and at full fury can kick out some reasonable damage, but i would say it is by no means essential. Stun suffers from the horrible animation time, although a guaranteed disorient is useful in PvP (i would imagine).
I took stun with Agony Aunt, thinking it would help against bosses, 2 slots in there now, seems to need a few more to be effective, but has potential